In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  Our Christmases were thrilling; we gave presents on the twenty-first, the Solstice, the day of the unconquered sun, wore crowns of the Saxon holly and ivy while chanting the pagan Dies sol invictus with unremitting jollity. And if the choristers were out of tune or mumbling the words, Ainoha would give the conductor a consoling smile. Then we lit a huge bonfire on the front lawn, sacrificing the insipid pine to Odin’s sacred oak, put human masks on all the dogs, their snouts upon us. There followed twelve days of fasting and mourning, celebrating something much older and stranger than the birth of “that man,” in my father’s scornful mention, “who never wrote a single word.” I could forgive Christianity its fanaticism; it was its skepticism permeating everything that set me against it. As the Astingi know, there is nothing more amusing than playing pagans in Purgatorio.

  I shouldn’t leave the impression that Mother wasn’t maternal. It was only that her sensual self was so powerful, that it told her that she couldn’t protect us from the world, even for a day, as much as we all wanted to believe in her semi-divinity. So it was that she continuously pushed both my father and myself out from the Land Behind the Forest. After a hug, she submerged her instincts, renounced her status, and even in our most desperate moments turned us round face-out to the world. She wasn’t cold or diffident. It was simply a kind of reversal of the sexual. She just announced, as she had in her first labor pains, “That way!”

  Like everything else in our world, I would not understand this until I saw the drama reenacted by beasts. In late January, the four brooks from the four valleys froze solid, the spider’s web of haze which hung over Semper Vero snapped, and blizzards stunned even the moles and beavers into inanimate submission. From my tower window, I could see the huddled aurochs up to their knees in the drifts, every curl on their faces blasted with frost, every breath turned into a small geyser. Their heavy heads and thickened necks were perfectly suited for smashing through the crust of ice and foraging for tufts of brown grass. At that time of year, the only sound beyond the wind was these animals’ labored breathing. The calves milled around their mothers, trying to share in the patch of grass they had just stamped out of the snow. But the females, already carrying next year’s calves, simply butted them away, telling them in effect to dig their own. The thaws gave up the ribcages of those who didn’t, not always the weakest by any means. And the mothers would mourn them, browsing around the skeletons and chasing away the foxes.

  It made me feel like the luckiest man alive.

  Semper Vero was of course Ainoha’s adoptive family’s, owing to their sudden spontaneous mutation from fairly ordinary to well-off folk, the odds on which my father never failed to believe he could capitalize and securitize. And she encouraged him in this, though she suspected he was doomed to failure. Priam’s relations had led the Russians through the Pass at Cjank (the officers bivouacking at Semper Vero) on their way to crushing the revolutions of 1848—though the family had also provided arms to innumerable failed peasant rebellions, and Mother herself would be the first to enlist against the Russians in the Great War. Though this appears contradictory (the pantheon of goddesses has always appeared rather scatterbrained), I believe there was a serious principle operating here. The most dangerous of men, after all, is the self-appointed heretic in a righteous cause, and it is the goddess’s duty, whenever such men appear, to cancel him out, and restore, by whatever necessary means, the cosmic equilibrium. The Mistress of the Living, Mistress of the Dead, fights on the side of those she personally likes, regardless of their politics. For her, the divine was just another category of human thought. And as worshipers of the ditch know, survival is insured only if a little bit of everything is thrown into the burial pit, as we never know how the story is going to come out. The history that the goddess sets herself in favor of is simply that long struggle of people who want nothing more than to lead ordinary lives, but who are manipulated into conflicts by men who know no peace.

  She had learned early on that insistent, preternatural dignity can often give offense, and so we must manufacture, often from nothing, the most problematic aura of all: warmth. The Goddess does not revel in her gash; she knows no chthonic mystery lies there. She knows that the only power that matters is power doubled, power to the second power, energy squared, the power of the pair. By mixing the dresses of different thoughts, the Goddess ought to encourage perspicuity, and by reinstituting reticence into everyday relations, prevent the eclipse of Familyland. The perfect wife is one who does not believe in either her husband’s fortune or his ruin. Just as there was no point in apologizing for being a goddess, there was also no point in being legendary if it just made one unhappy. She knew she was no more primal than she was a finished item; only a hasty blend of antiquity with the ever-receding present.

  “Do you have any idea,” she warned Father when his courting took on a lucid measure, “do you have any idea at all, how hard it is to please a woman?” And when I brought home an unsatisfactory school report, she would nod and smile, and drawing it across my palm, leave a paper cut, as a feathery tongue of flame appeared in my head.

  It would not heal until the grasses came up.

  Mother loathed all political beliefs, and as a result never felt impelled to acquire the German language. “The continual presence of a fixed idea,” she insisted, “forces the jaw muscles to overdevelop and the visage to age prematurely,” and she believed fervently that devotion of the heart is good for the complexion. She also insisted that Astingi skulls were so constructed that a scalp wound received in any ideological struggle would completely heal in no more than fourteen days. She could divert the most hysterical of political arguments by simply laying a plump bare forearm upon the table, rendering the warring gentlemen speechless.

  And if Father had his love-hate affair with Germans, hers was with the French. She saw all their talk of Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité as Paternalism, Nationalism, and Alcoholism, a nation that left its dogs to starve in the woods after a hunt. If she had a program, it was to replace the weak Western reading of liberty with discipline, equality with solitude, and fraternity with the tenderness of unlike creatures.

  Anyone with a cursory knowledge of ancient history knows that the goddesses were no less whimsical or debauched than the Gods, and nothing amused Mother more than the project of gentrifying the goddess. For having observed a thousand litters and their parents, no one can deny that the gene of ambition, like that of baldness, is carried by the female. “A woman is clearly the equal of any man, even a mean man,” she often said, “but a woman cannot become a gentleman, that is, be stoical and fair.” She preferred the company of men, and she frightened women in the same way that Father frightened men, with the gay fatalism of the soldier. Just as some women find men who are indifferent to them irresistible, Mother was attracted to the sort of man who struggled to keep his baser instincts under control, acknowledging that they were transitional figures in a game which threatened to explode into a pointless, murderous brawl at any moment. She knew you could get anything out of a man by questioning his courage, and so avoided it at all costs. Strong men for her were no particular problem. It is the strong man suddenly grown weak who is truly dangerous; yet it is the particular pathos of their species that men are truly fascinating only in their weakness. “It is men’s nature to run away,” she told me early on, no doubt alluding to Priam, “for men, if not victorious, prefer to disappear without a trace. But women leave traces, and the right woman,” she observed with a saturnine grin and revealing her foot tightly covered in black silk like a serpent’s head, “can ruin anything!”

  She did not want “a man,” nor all men; she wanted Man.

  I believe the only aspect of her role she regretted was as Patroness of Arts. To conquer the artworld did not strike her as much of a conquest, and while she did her best to reluctantly champion peoples’ rights to alienation and unending originality, she found the peculiar combination of exhibitionism and sullen introspection of the literary world s
omething of a bore. Indeed, she was interested in those few areas of experience which lie totally outside art. Struggling with the muse, like sexuality, were for her quite recent and unexamined nouveaux conventions. “If you must wait for inspiration,” she often said, “you may as well give up.” And there were days, in the presence of the many artistes who frequented our home, when she could be Jocasta, Lady Macbeth, and Clytemnestra rolled into one, while she took their measure. Mother knew several things about art and none of them had to do with sanity or happiness. She was not fooled by the sort of people who hijacked the word “creative” from theology, and who claimed the rights of patronage without subserving to any of their patron’s purposes. “A work of art, like an oyster, mon chérie,” she once remarked to a drunken poet, “can come up as easily as it went down.”

  Her only interest in art, other than origami and collecting garden statuary, was a diary, strictly descriptive and dispassionate: addresses, places, the exact name and catalog number of a piece of music she had heard, the drawing of an architectural detail, and almost never a single use of a personal pronoun. But she gave up on it early, discovering a diary is the last place you look for truth. The final entry reads: “Oh, I’ve botched it terribly, dear diary; forgive me, but you are not my genre. Why do people write so much?”

  Ainoha would rather be read about than write—the most human condition.

  The florid precision of her voice was unforgettable. It was as if her respiration had a physical weight and location, a sculpted sound of air enveloping each individual word. When put out, her pitch was tinged with flatness, and perfections of the upper range had to be smoothed over with deceptive tailoring. Yet so winning was her personae that she could turn flatness into an expressive device and make frailty a source of appeal. The dogs gathered round her while she practiced, and her occasional stepping on their paws produced a less than dulcet chorus of high E’s and F’s. Her breathing was inextricably bound up with her sentences, and when she mentioned my father’s name in public, it was surrounded with extended sighs and mesmerizing melismas. On the other hand, one of her more distressing habits was, when at concerts, to tap out the underlying beat on Father’s forearm, the tempo just slightly off. It drove him absolutely crazy, but he never said a word. Yes, she was the major blurry triad, the Tristram home Chord, from which all music issues and returns. But the muse cannot herself sing.

  If not precisely pure, Ainoha was intellectually delicate, and would, like any blue chip, have to be held for years to perform. She had only one fear and that was the signing of documents. She had only one weakness. She did not believe in savings. Like Beatrice, she was prone to lecture and was knowledgeable only about Heaven. And serenity is an expensive business. Certainly, she would defend beauty and attractiveness beyond all things, but she was absolutely determined that beauty should not be her downfall, and this constant vigilance encouraged a certain straining for effect and invisible wear and tear upon the soul and parts. And so her syncopated curls and tender nuances often turned with delayed resolutions into a kind of magisterial musical hiccups.

  I stood erect in the long bright hallway of my life, staring out at the fogged-in river, my larynx falling toward my heart, the gorge of a word upon my lips. I had finally started speaking, and felt immediately that something stupid had happened to me. Mother asked innocently, incuriously, “where are you going?” I hadn’t really thought about it, but I knew that I should stay calm, appear to cooperate, and create a good rapport, so that I could lie through my teeth. For she was made to lie to, and men will do anything to get women out of their minds. Then I heard a voice. But it wasn’t me that was speaking, or at least I did not listen to what it said to me, in the same way I heard what others said. For there comes a point in life where everything invested in you and expected of you no longer matters and you become a kind of Third Person—and nothing can be understood apart from this.

  Mother apparently quite well understood what was going on in this strange aesthetical puberty. She looked evenly into my half-closed eyes, then took me by the hand and led me down to the Mze. “If you don’t lie, you don’t have to remember what you say,” she said earnestly. Then she pushed my face close to the water, incanting,

  Come and wet us waters

  Look up, look down,

  May as much come into the eye

  As came out, and

  May it now perish

  Using her large hands as a pail, one leg in the river and one on shore, my indispensable Naiadish companion wet me down until I was dripping from head to foot, and with her thumb washed out my mouth. Then she said something rather extraordinary: “If you cannot be truthful, then at least be deep.”

  “Oh, girl!” the river groaned. Swallows dove like raptors into the yellow foam, and at each plunge a ruby droplet sprang forth. Fish leapt for dragonflies and mouthed them whole, settling back engorged and feline in the waters. And mayflies clotted corybantically above the feeding ground in singing flight, kissing each other in milliseconds without consolation, insensate. I knew I had in me the blood of the Peraperduga, those naked young girls who in times of drought were set in motion by the Astingi from village to village, where libations of wine and water were poured over their heads, and they would dance, shivering from joy, until the rains came. But I dried quickly, like a horse.

  Then Ainoha made a garland of poppies and put it round my head, threw sticks and herbs into the river, and gave me a stone to bite. Her lingering touch was like a cigar burn. The sun was hot, the pines smelled sweet, and on the hills the last pearbloom was scattering. She made a garland of poplar blossoms for her hair, and pinned a corsage of tongue-shaped sorrel on the black ribbon of her belt. Her waist was so small a tiny child could reach his arms around it. Her deep bosom and sculpted shoulders, her fine rounded arms and slender wrists hung over me like stormclouds. Little ringlets of hair escaped from the pansies on her temples, droplets of sweat appeared in the small valley of her upper lip. Her eyes were the color of violets in the rain, a sweet companion to my bitter shoulder. But the more I acknowledged her beauty, the less mystery it aroused in me. More aware than ever of the weaponry of her appeal, I began to find it almost offensive. The voice had become a wail—not the weeping of a woman or child, but some old bloody hero howling, in the rush of three great rivers roaring as they flow, a propitiation to her spell.

  Her mortal eye, my mortal eye,

  Our mortal hands

  Silent angel, write silence

  In my hands,

  Alleilu

  The me that wasn’t speaking was the Wodna Mze, my Waterman, the spirit I would come to lean on as no other. He was the one who gathered Ainoha’s combings from the river, and sewing them together with bark and fungus, made a cradle for her Fire Child. As usual, the Mze gave no reflection even in its most serene calm. But sitting on the river floor amidst toppled rotting stumps, I spied my miserable Waterman asorrowing, howling for the flower on the bank who inclines her head to listen to the powers of the water. For no one has ever escaped love, or ever will, as long as there is beauty in the eye to see with.

  Ainoha kept singing her countercharms and kept pouring water over me, laughing all the while. A gust of wind had flattened her skirt about her belly, accentuating the soft outlines of her bivalved Venus, the only trace of the eternal ocean in our part of the world. The reed-beds nodded their gray-green heads in the breeze as the bullrushes rasped. I knew that to leave this world I must pass through her gate.

  I bit on the stone. Despite her placations and invocations, I would not be disenchanted. I refused to put my face into the waters. I objected to being purified or rescued. I would not fall into her arms. Nor would I lose myself in her loosened hair, for a real goddess occasionally prefers resistance to appeasement. She knew I loved something before her, something already dissolved in the very water in which my embryo floated. I stood shivering from head to toe, well into dusk.

  Finally, gathering up her skirts, Ainoha stood up and put h
er hands on her hips, her slender shape blocking out chaos. The pansies were wilting on her noble brow, and owls with their great miner’s lamps of eyes flapped upriver to mine the falling darkness.

  “Very well,” she said with winsome exasperation, “you are a brave boy. And for that I shall love you forever.”

  Flat as a fish, entrusting myself to her faith, but leaning on my Waterman, I turned Leviathan and escaped beneath the earth into those vast realms far beyond the night.

  CORDIALS

  (Iulus)

  It was a solemn evening of impressive adult talk, and many crystal beakers of moon wine and Armagnac were emptied. Much of the conversation was above my head, though when the subject turned inevitably to Wolf, I realized they were speaking with the tact necessary for dealing with those more trouble than they were worth, a category in which I included myself and all the other helpless creatures in the world, and to which this handsome threesome had such an irrational attachment.

  They spoke of themselves as gay soldiers and sober custodians waging a battle for Wolf ’s nihilistic soul. They would have preferred to run away from those responsibilities, I believe, perhaps to engage in one of those primitive rituals wherein all ties and taboos are thrown off for a fortnight, men and women anonymously and cheerfully betraying each other in a dark forest. It was only their contempt for the weakness of the majority which kept them from running off. They all admitted there were times when they wanted to take Wolf for a walk and shoot him cleanly through the base of the skull. Certainly that’s what the Astingi would have done. I blushed for their honesty. And I would never know whether I was meant to hear this or they simply had forgotten my presence.